Professor Behe can’t respond to this for at least a week so let’s give him a hand by fisking it. Please keep your comments topical, focused, and well supported by evidence arguing against the reviewer’s conclusions.

So I thought I'd create a thread to discuss Behe's response, if any ever arrives.

The above quote was posted on the 9th June 2007 and so a week is this coming saturday the 16th.

I look forwards to Behe attempting to defend all the various aspects of his "work" that have been demolished so far in reviews.

--------------I also mentioned that He'd have to give me a thorough explanation as to *why* I must "eat human babies".FTK

if there are even critical flaws in Gauger’s work, the evo mat narrative cannot standGordon Mullings

--------------"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus

The Coyne review is one very long mishmash of ad hominem, argument from authority, misunderstanding, and question begging. The ad hominem (questioning my motives, gratuitously citing folks who disagree with me without saying why that’s pertinent to my argument, and so on) I will not reply to. The argument from authority is the most incomprehensible part of his essay. Alluding to my participation in the Dover, Pennsylvania court case of 2005, early in the review Coyne writes “More damaging than the scientific criticisms of Behe's work was the review that he got in 2005 from Judge John E. Jones III.”

Wow, more damaging than scientific criticisms?! Leave aside the fact that the parts of the opinion Coyne finds so congenial (which are standard Darwinian criticisms of intelligent design) were actually written by the plaintiffs’ lawyers and simply copied by the judge into his opinion. (Whenever the opinion discusses the testimony of any expert witness — for either side, whether scientists, philosophers, or theologians — the judge copied the lawyers’ writing. Although such copying is apparently tolerated in legal circles, it leaves wide open the question of whether the judge even comprehended the abstruse academic issues discussed in his courtroom.) Frankly, it’s astounding that a prominent academic evolutionary biologist like Coyne hides behind the judicial skirts of the former head of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. If Coyne himself can’t explain how Darwinism can cope with the challenges The Edge of Evolution cites, how could a non-scientist judge?

The Coyne review is one very long mishmash of ad hominem, argument from authority, misunderstanding, and question begging. The ad hominem (questioning my motives, gratuitously citing folks who disagree with me without saying why that’s pertinent to my argument, and so on) I will not reply to. The argument from authority is the most incomprehensible part of his essay. Alluding to my participation in the Dover, Pennsylvania court case of 2005, early in the review Coyne writes “More damaging than the scientific criticisms of Behe's work was the review that he got in 2005 from Judge John E. Jones III.”

Wow, more damaging than scientific criticisms?! Leave aside the fact that the parts of the opinion Coyne finds so congenial (which are standard Darwinian criticisms of intelligent design) were actually written by the plaintiffs’ lawyers and simply copied by the judge into his opinion. (Whenever the opinion discusses the testimony of any expert witness — for either side, whether scientists, philosophers, or theologians — the judge copied the lawyers’ writing. Although such copying is apparently tolerated in legal circles, it leaves wide open the question of whether the judge even comprehended the abstruse academic issues discussed in his courtroom.) Frankly, it’s astounding that a prominent academic evolutionary biologist like Coyne hides behind the judicial skirts of the former head of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. If Coyne himself can’t explain how Darwinism can cope with the challenges The Edge of Evolution cites, how could a non-scientist judge?

No ad hominem arguments in Behe's rebuttal, no sir... No projection, either.

--------------Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mindHas been obligated from the beginningTo create an ordered universeAs the only possible proof of its own inheritance. - Pattiann Rogers

The Coyne review is one very long mishmash of ad hominem, argument from authority, misunderstanding, and question begging. The ad hominem (questioning my motives, gratuitously citing folks who disagree with me without saying why that’s pertinent to my argument, and so on) I will not reply to. The argument from authority is the most incomprehensible part of his essay. Alluding to my participation in the Dover, Pennsylvania court case of 2005, early in the review Coyne writes “More damaging than the scientific criticisms of Behe's work was the review that he got in 2005 from Judge John E. Jones III.”

Wow, more damaging than scientific criticisms?! Leave aside the fact that the parts of the opinion Coyne finds so congenial (which are standard Darwinian criticisms of intelligent design) were actually written by the plaintiffs’ lawyers and simply copied by the judge into his opinion. (Whenever the opinion discusses the testimony of any expert witness — for either side, whether scientists, philosophers, or theologians — the judge copied the lawyers’ writing. Although such copying is apparently tolerated in legal circles, it leaves wide open the question of whether the judge even comprehended the abstruse academic issues discussed in his courtroom.) Frankly, it’s astounding that a prominent academic evolutionary biologist like Coyne hides behind the judicial skirts of the former head of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. If Coyne himself can’t explain how Darwinism can cope with the challenges The Edge of Evolution cites, how could a non-scientist judge?

No ad hominem arguments in Behe's rebuttal, no sir... No projection, either.

Indeed. It was the part you highlighted in bold that caused the circuit breaker on my irony meter to trip.

Indeed. It was the part you highlighted in bold that caused the circuit breaker on my irony meter to trip.

Well, that is a good bit. But even more hilarious is this statement "If Coyne himself can’t explain how Darwinism can cope with the challenges The Edge of Evolution cites, how could a non-scientist judge?"

IIRC, it was Behe, and not Coyne, who had an opportunity to explain the problems with "Darwinism" to the judge. And failed spectacularly.

--------------Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mindHas been obligated from the beginningTo create an ordered universeAs the only possible proof of its own inheritance. - Pattiann Rogers

--------------"[A scientific theory] describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is - absurd."- Richard P. Feynman

The Coyne review is one very long mishmash of ad hominem, argument from authority, misunderstanding, and question begging. The ad hominem (questioning my motives, gratuitously citing folks who disagree with me without saying why that’s pertinent to my argument, and so on) I will not reply to. The argument from authority is the most incomprehensible part of his essay. Alluding to my participation in the Dover, Pennsylvania court case of 2005, early in the review Coyne writes “More damaging than the scientific criticisms of Behe's work was the review that he got in 2005 from Judge John E. Jones III.”

Wow, more damaging than scientific criticisms?! Leave aside the fact that the parts of the opinion Coyne finds so congenial (which are standard Darwinian criticisms of intelligent design) were actually written by the plaintiffs’ lawyers and simply copied by the judge into his opinion. (Whenever the opinion discusses the testimony of any expert witness — for either side, whether scientists, philosophers, or theologians — the judge copied the lawyers’ writing. Although such copying is apparently tolerated in legal circles, it leaves wide open the question of whether the judge even comprehended the abstruse academic issues discussed in his courtroom.) Frankly, it’s astounding that a prominent academic evolutionary biologist like Coyne hides behind the judicial skirts of the former head of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. If Coyne himself can’t explain how Darwinism can cope with the challenges The Edge of Evolution cites, how could a non-scientist judge?

As you might imagine, the Discovery Institute's Logan Gage doesn't like Dawkin's review (they don't like Miller or Coyne's either). In a long howl of anguish posted on the Evolution News and Views blog, Gage denies that Behe has stepped back, but never bothers to mention Behe's acceptance of natural selection and common descent.

The howl is found hereNow, how dishonest is this - the bolded line below (taken from the howl!)

Quote

Dawkins also says that Behe’s claim that the bacterial flagellum will not work properly without all of its parts is “without justification.” Unfortunately for Dawkins, knockout experiments have been done, and so this assertion is not without justification. For example, Scott Minnich, microbiologist at the University of Idaho, testified at the Dover Trial about his knockout experiments which found that the flagellum is irreducibly complex with respect to its 35 or so genes. Judge Jones ignored this testimony, and so does Richard Dawkins. Why doesn’t Dawkins know the relevant science?

Would this be the same Scott Minnich that wikipedia notes as

Quote

a fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

?If it was, i'm sure it was an honest slip that it was not mentioned. After all, honesty and integrity are what the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture is all about! ha. His name is mentioned only once in the article, in the quote I pasted.

EDIT: After a little more research (teh google) It appears that the quote is even more dishonest then it first appears. From PT Nick Matzke posted Entry 2712 on November 10, 2006 03:45 AM.

Quote

I actually think Minnich was referring to the royal we here, as in “we scientists”, not his own lab, since to my knowledge he hasn’t personally done all of those knockouts (which were all originally done in the 1970s and 1980s in diverse labs).

is simply not true! I stand to be corrected of course, but somehow I suspect I'm right and that Minnich has not done all 35 tests! Yet the Disco people are now claiming that he did and that the results support ID!

For example, Scott Minnich, microbiologist at the University of Idaho, testified at the Dover Trial about his knockout experiments which found that the flagellum is irreducibly complex with respect to its 35 or so genes.

Minnich did testify that he did the work:

Quote

Q. Break down for us further this concept of mutagenesis, and I believe you have a slide --

A. Sure. All right. I work on the bacterial flagellum, understanding the function of the bacterial flagellum for example by exposing cells to mutagenic compounds or agents, and then scoring for cells that have attenuated or lost motility. This is our phenotype. The cells can swim or they can't. We mutagenize the cells, if we hit a gene that's involved in function of the flagellum, they can't swim, which is a scorable phenotype that we use. Reverse engineering is then employed to identify all these genes. We couple this with biochemistry to essentially rebuild the structure and understand what the function of each individual part is. Summary, it is the process more akin to design that propelled biology from a mere descriptive science to an experimental science in terms of employing these techniques.

Q. Do you have some examples employing this particular concept of the flagella?

A. I do, in the next slide. Hopefully this will cut to the chase and show you what we're talking about. This is an organism that my students and I work on. This is a petri dish about 15 millimeters size, filled with this soft auger food source for the organism. It's soft in the sense the organisms can swim in it, but it has some rigidity that they just don't slosh around. Now, each one of these areas showing growth were inoculated with a toothpick of cells, the wild type parent here. So this is yersinia enterocolitica, a good pathogen, double bucket disease if you ingest it.

Q. That's the center?

A. Yeah, that's the center, okay? So it can swim. So it was inoculated right here, and over about twelve hours it's radiated out from that point of inoculant. Here is this same derived from that same parental clone, but we have a transposon, a jumping gene inserted into a rod protein, part of the drive shaft for the flagellum. It can't swim. It's stuck, all right? This one is a mutation in the U joint. Same phenotype. So we collect cells that have been mutagenized, we stick them in soft auger, we can screen a couple of thousand very easily with a few undergraduates, you know, in a day and look for whether or not they can swim.

Q. I'm sorry, just so we're clear on the record, the two you're talking about on the bottom left, the first one was the bottom left and the second one was the bottom right?

A. Right.

Q. Where you took away a portion of the flagella?

A. We have a mutation in a drive shaft protein or the U joint, and they can't swim. Now, to confirm that that's the only part that we've affected, you know, is that we can identify this mutation, clone the gene from the wild type and reintroduce it by mechanism of genetic complementation. So this is, these cells up here are derived from this mutant where we have complemented with a good copy of the gene.

One mutation, one part knock out, it can't swim. Put that single gene back in we restore motility. Same thing over here. We put, knock out one part, put a good copy of the gene back in, and they can swim. By definition the system is irreducibly complex. We've done that with all 35 components of the flagellum, and we get the same effect.

I don't know whether Minnich's knockout studies in particular have been published. From the testimony, it is unclear whether Minnich did knockout work on anything but Yersinia enterocolitica.

As the Matzke and Pallen review paper notes, though, there are all sorts of bacterial flagella out there, and a protein knockout in one that disables function does not necessarily do so in another, the bacteria don't all rely on the exact same proteins in their flagella, and various proteins used in flagella can be shown to be related to proteins doing other jobs in bacteria. Once you account for the ways in which a protein may not be necessary to function or able to be co-opted from other functions in the ensemble of all studied bacterial flagella, you are down to two proteins without currently known antecedents that are necessary to flagellar function. One wonders why Logan Gage isn't up on *that*.

If you don’t answer, consider yourself univited to this thread as well.

Now, the thing is, knowing UD as well as we do, if no answer is forthcoming then that can mean that the poster is unable to answer because the do not know the answer or they've been banned already and the IDiots can pretend that they won that one.

It's worth reading that thread for JAM's comments

Quote

There is no evidence to support his claim.

and he makes a dozen or so reasonable points and Sal is reduced to asking

Quote

Did Behe argue that a malarial strain will have CQ resistance if and only if it has the 76 and 220 mutations that confer resistance?

I mean, asking what exactly Behe said rather then addressing the points themselves is going to get Sal where exactly? Even if JAM concedes the point, so what? What about the other points JAM makes?

Sal, i've just got one thing to say to you!

Answer, or consider yourself univited to the reality based community!

--------------I also mentioned that He'd have to give me a thorough explanation as to *why* I must "eat human babies".FTK

if there are even critical flaws in Gauger’s work, the evo mat narrative cannot standGordon Mullings